Artist depiction of what the Tower of Babel (temple of Enki at Eridu) would have looked like if it had been finished. Archaeologists who excavated the E-abzu in the late 1940s discovered “the total abandonment of the site” before its completion–just as described in Genesis 11:8-9.

They mean well, but Christians celebrating the newly translated tablet from ancient Babylon are mistaken. Contrary to the report by the Smithsonian Channel, the tablet is not evidence of the existence of the Tower of Babel.

The tablet dates to the 6th century B.C. The inscription describes a building project by king Nebuchadnezzar, who was known for big public works projects. But the Tower of Babel was not one of them.

Does this mean there is no physical evidence for the existence of the Tower of Babel? No! There is plenty of evidence and secular scholars know it. But Nebuchadnezzar is the wrong king in the wrong place at the wrong time for his ziggurat to be Babel.

First of all, nobody thinks Nebuchadnezzar was Nimrod. Assuming Nimrod ruled during the Uruk Expansion period, which covered most of the 4th millennium B.C. (4000 B.C.-3000 B.C.), then Nebuchadnezzar is about 3,000 years too late to be the builder of Babel.

In fact, Babylon wasn’t even founded until about 2300 B.C. The kingdom of Babylon was founded by an Amorite chief named Sumu-Abum in 1894 B.C.

Second, the oldest, largest, and arguably most important ziggurat in Mesopotamian history was the temple of Enki/Ea, the Sumerian/Akkadian “lord of the earth,” the god of wisdom, magic, and exorcism. It was located at Eridu, about 150 miles southeast of Babylon.

The e-abzu (“House of the Abyss”) was so important in Mesopotamian religion that as late as Nebuchadnezzar’s time, kings of Babylon sometimes referred to themselves as LUGAL.NUNki–king of Eridu.

Ba`al was the main enemy of Yahweh in the Old Testament. One could argue that he was even more of a villain in the Bible than Satan, who’s only mentioned in fourteen Old Testament verses, in the books of 1 Chronicles, Job, and Zechariah. Ba`al, on the other hand, appears 106 times in 88 verses (including personal and place names, like Baal-zephon).

If we’d been interested in stopping at a nice biblical number to justify a catchy title, something like The Seven Mountains of the Supernatural War, we’d have ended the book at Mount Zion. But this book would be incomplete without bringing up an eighth holy mountain, one that’s had a tremendous and incredibly destructive impact on the world.

Jesus, of course, was fully aware of the ongoing war for his holy mountain. For him, the war was personal.

Let’s bring our timeline of history into focus: The Bible tells us that Abraham arrived in Canaan 430 years before the Exodus. With the Exodus at 1446 B.C., that puts Abraham in Canaan in 1876 B.C., just as the fog over the political situation in Mesopotamia lifted with Amorites in control.

In a previous article in this series, we mentioned an odd comment that God made when He gave Abraham a glimpse at the future:

As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.“

By the time Moses arrived on the scene, around 1500 B.C., the Hebrews had been in Egypt for more than a hundred years. The days of Joseph serving as vizier to the pharaoh were long gone. The Hebrews had grown from an extended family of about six dozen to a couple million, but they were suffering under the rule of a nation that no longer valued their presence except as forced labor.

Let’s fast forward about 1,000 years from Babel. After the tower was abandoned, it appears that a group of Sumerians traveled by sea around the Arabian peninsula, and then overland across the wadis extending west from the Red Sea to found the 1st dynasty of Egypt.

Not all the holy mountains in the history of the world are natural, formed by the shifting of tectonic plates or the sudden, catastrophic opening of “the fountains of the great deep.” The Tower of Babel was one such artificial mountain. Babel was humanity’s attempt to force its way back into the divine council.